


Judging Something Else

by orphan_account



Category: Super Science Friends (Cartoon)
Genre: Found Family, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 22:28:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16072643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: After a near-fatal encounter with Josef Mengele, Einstein contemplates the Nazis' anti-Semitic priorities.





	Judging Something Else

**Author's Note:**

> Man, people who haven't seen Super Science Friends are gonna be super confused if they read any of these fanfictions. You ever think about that? Because I do, like, all the time

With the sizzle of molten metal, a glowing green hole was left in the steel door of the supposedly abandoned Nazi bunker that the team was ordered to investigate. Everyone stepped inside to see an empty room, save a few littered corpses of disposable Nazi soldiers. Their causes of death were uncertain; it looked like they just collapsed where they were standing and began rotting.  


“Be careful, everyone, it could be a trap.” Darwin cautioned. Einstein strayed ahead of the group immediately.  


“So, we break up and search?” He asked.  


“Don't go off by yourself! We’ll go in pairs-” Marie replied sternly, but was interrupted by the high-pitched zoom of the teenager running deeper into the bunker. The chemist sighed, stomping down the hallway in pursuit.  


The Nazis made the impression on Einstein that they were fumbling, inefficient fools, almost comedic in their nature. Every time he witnessed an encounter between them and his team, he was assured once more that they were hardly a threat at all.  


Einstein had never seen what they were capable of in larger numbers, or when led by more intelligent minds. Churchill and Freud were particularly stone-faced whenever the Third Reich came up in conversation.  


They knew.  


As Einstein quickly bolted in and out of rooms, he learned that the bunker was actually housing multiple laboratories for various experiments. Most of the labs were cleaned up and empty, giving him no information as to what happened there.  


He swung another door open, rushing in. But this time, what he saw made him freeze in place.  


“What the hell?” He muttered in shock.  


A bloody mess lying on an operating table; two nameless Nazi clones, brutally mutilated, then stitched back together to form a single gut-wrenching abomination. Plastered on their faces were a final gasp for air before their eyes glossed over.  


He felt sick. He turned to leave the room, only to see a silhouette standing in the doorway. One he didn't recognize.  


“Albert Einstein.” Came the slimy voice, weighed down by a German accent. The person stepped forward, slamming the door behind them.  


A scientist in a lab coat. The bone-chilling gaze in his eyes was like that of a snake about to strike.  


“Is this the pet project the Americans have worked on? What a sorry excuse for a hero.” The man said. Einstein raised his fists defensively and took a weak-willed fighting stance. The scientist chuckled, pulling off his rubber gloves. His hands were pale, almost blue, and stiff.  


“Getting ready to fight like an animal. That's all you are. That's all any of you are.”  


The scientist was no longer judging the boy for his affiliation with the Super Science Friends. He was judging something else.  


Einstein leapt forward, throwing his leg outward in an arc, but the attack was dodged. He landed awkwardly, regaining his balance, then tried to punch the man in front of him. To his surprise, his fist landed squarely in the man's palm, who tightened his grip. His other hand held Einstein's wrist and pulled him forward. And without warning, a hand latched around his neck.  


It was ice cold. It didn't take long for Einstein to feel the heat being literally pulled from his body.  


“You're not an animal. You're less than an animal… You people are the worms underneath my boots.”  


Einstein's hands tried to pry the scientist's fingers away, but his strength was quickly fading as he lost his breath. His feet kicked weakly underneath him as he was lifted from the floor.  


The kinks of his hair, the hook of his nose, and the color of his eyes were all the scientist needed to pass judgement upon him as a lesser being.  


“I see you kill each other for a piece of bread.”  


His struggles ended as his vision went cloudy.  


“If I saw you in my camp, I would have…”  


The last thing the boy could remember was a loud bang, the man's face turning to shock, and seeing his teammates standing over him after he fell to the ground.  


The first thing he saw when he woke up was Churchill at his bedside. Although there was some attempt on his part to hide it, the politician’s face had been reddened and tear-stained from crying.  


“Oh, my God, he's awake! He's alive!” He said, after seeing the teenager's eyes flutter open. Then he turned back to him, patting his hand.  


“There's my boy… How are you feeling?”  


Einstein swallowed. His mouth felt dry.  


“...Cold…” He said. His voice was cracked and quiet.  


“It's no wonder. Mengele almost killed you.”  


He hadn't heard that name before. But it didn't take a genius to put two and two together. He didn't have the strength to say anything else.  


“He woke up?” Came an interruption. The faces of Albert’s teammates came into view as they crammed their way through the door. He then felt warm fingers pressed against his neck. His eyes turned to see Curie, checking his pulse, looking more exhausted than usual.  


“They were up all night keeping you alive, Albert,” Churchill continued. There was an odd tenderness about him as he gripped the boy's hand.  


“S-sorry…” Einstein muttered. He was surprised to feel Curie gently brushing the hair away from his face.  


“You made a mistake. Learn from it. That's all any of us can do.” Her voice was more tired than stern.  


Einstein was ready to have been scolded by each member for scaring them or wasting their time. Instead, he received caring statements from each of them as they doted on his needs. What he thought would be anger was actually relief, and what he thought would be shouting turned out to be cautious whispers. Even Tesla poked his head in the doorway to ask him how he was doing as the day went on.  


Then again, none of his other mistakes ever left him on the brink of death like that.  


The boy laid in bed all day, weighed down by heavy blankets. Though the time passed slowly for him, he could practically see the filtered sunlight turning from left to right through his window as dawn changed to dusk. With nothing to think about other than what happened the day before, he stared at the ceiling, and let Mengele’s words roll around in his mind.  


This happened to him because he was Jewish.  


He knew that anti-Semitism was the Nazis’ highest priority, but he never stopped to think he would ever be a victim of it. He thought he was one of the impenetrable good guys, part of the team that always managed to save the day in the end. He didn’t see himself as a Jew, or Marie as a Slav, or Tapputi as an Arab. He saw them as people.  


The Nazis were obsessed with biological purity. To them, most of the members of the Super Science Friends were born inferior. Their only solution was to kill them… For the sake of progressing humanity.  


Then he thought about the camps Mengele mentioned, and felt sick again. With a weak hand, he threw the blankets off of himself, then stood on wobbly legs to go wash his face in the bathroom.  


When he left the bathroom and headed back down the hallway, he spotted that Freud had left his door open.  


Freud was Jewish, too. Despite his psychoanalysis being regarded as ridiculous gibberish, Einstein could admit that the therapist was surprisingly helpful in solving people’s problems.  


He approached the bedroom. Freud sat in his armchair with his back to the door, chewing on a cigar that sent a thin wisp of smoke over his head. He must not have heard his footsteps, because he was visibly startled when Einstein spoke.  


“Freud?” He asked weakly. Freud jumped a bit and turned in his seat.  


“Oh, Einstein! It’s good to see you out of bed. You must be feeling better, yeah?”  


The boy nodded and rubbed grit out of his eyes.  


“Is there something you needed?” The man continued.  


“Actually, uh… Could I ask you a question?”  


Freud nodded, and waved him over to come inside. Einstein took a seat on the man’s signature swooning couch.  


“I’m all ears.”  


The boy thought about how to word his question. Eventually, he blurted it out.  


“Why do people hate us?”  


“I thought the Super Science Friends were popular. We’re always in the newspapers.”  


“No… Not ‘us’ as in the team. ‘Us’ as in you and me. Jews.”  


The question made Freud blink and sit straight. It caught him off guard. He pulled his cigar out of his mouth and scratched his beard.  


“Well… That’s going back thousands of years. Maybe the biggest reason is that Christians think Jews killed Jesus Christ.”  


Einstein’s face wrinkled in deep thought.  


“But they didn’t, actually. It was the Romans. Some people don’t know that.” Freud continued.  


“Why do you ask?”  


Einstein took the moment to lay down on the couch; sitting upright that long had made him woozy, and he was still dehydrated.  


“Uh… I was thinking about what happened yesterday.”  


“Mhmm?”  


“And… And we fought Nazis before, but…” He stopped to think if this was worth telling Freud.  


“But that was the first time I was scared.”  


Instead of an immediate response, he heard the rustle of papers and the click of a pen.  


“Why?”  


The boy scratched his forehead. His eyes drifted to the side as he thought.  


“All those Nazi clones we fight are just doing what they’re told, so… They kinda care about us, but they’re stupid, too. But… But that guy… He hated me.”  


“What did he say to you? Do you remember?”  


“He said that Jews were less than animals, and were worms under his feet, and that he would watch them kill each other for bread, or something.”  


Freud provided silence other than scratching his pen on the paper.  


“Forgive the basic question… How did that make you feel? When you heard him say that to you?”  


Einstein sniffed.  


“...I thought I was really gonna die. He was choking me, and I couldn't breathe, and I was cold…”  


“He made me realize what the Nazis really think. They aren't just… Saying that Germans are better, they're… They're saying that we aren't people.”  


“Did you believe him?”  


“...I don't know. Maybe for a second.”  


Freud continued to write for a bit, then stopped, and let his response age on his tongue before he said it.  


“Einstein… Do you think that any good could have come of this?”  


“What?”  


“Do you think that, maybe, you learned something because of this, or it helped you grow?”  


Silence.  


“Anything at all? There are no wrong answers.”  


“I guess… I guess I learned not to run away from the team.”  


“Good, good…”  


The boy yawned, stretching his arms over his head.  


“Thanks for listening to me.”  


“It's no trouble. Perhaps we've done enough for today, yeah? You look tired.”  


“Yeah, but… I don't feel like getting up.”  


That garnered a hearty laugh from Freud.  


“Would you like a blanket?”  


“...Yes, please.”

**Author's Note:**

> Mengele is famous for his obsession with experimenting on twins, but I decided to give him the power of pulling heat out of a victim's body because he also conducted hundreds of experiments of putting humans in extreme conditions like hypothermia and dehydration to see how far they could last, and what it would take to keep them alive afterwards.  
> A lot of the research he did is actually still useful for militaries and hospitals; it makes us think about where we should draw the line between progress in the name of science and the breach of human rights. But that's a philosophical question for another day


End file.
